NEWPORT — Swiss Village Farm, a faux medieval alpine estate that houses a foundation dedicated to preserving endangered livestock, welcomes guests on Saturday for its annual Visitors Day. The free event is both an educational and public relations exercise for an institution that is otherwise closed to the public.

The farm was built in 1909 by Arthur Curtiss James, a wealthy copper and railroad magnate who styled it on features that he had noted in the southern Swiss and Italian Alps. The overall effect is like the set of an elaborate opera.

“It’s a gentleman’s folly,” said SVF program and livestock manager Sarah Bowley.

It was a working farm for many years but fell into disrepair before Campbell Soup heiress Dorrance Hamilton bought the property along with 35 acres in 1998. She spent four years restoring it before teaming up with Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine to establish the SVF Foundation. It has since acquired an additional 11 acres adjacent to Fort Adams.

Bowley said visitors will be able to walk through most of the village with staff positioned at various locations to point out and explain features and animals. The farm has numerous examples of threatened breeds, including Horned Dorset sheep, once so numerous in New England they served as the mascot for the URI Rams; Kerry cattle from Ireland; Piney Woods cattle from the southern United States; and a Tennessee Myotonic, or fainting, goat born from a frozen embryo.

The heart of the SVF Foundation is in a series of sterile rooms in what used to be horse stables.

It is there that embryos and semen that have been extracted from critically endangered domestic animals are analyzed and sorted before being poured into straws and frozen at minus 196 degrees Celsius. Stored in a series of large steel drums cooled by liquid nitrogen, life is preserved in perpetuity.

“Four thousand animals are sleeping there,” said lab director Dorothy Roof, who spent the last eight years converting the stables into a state-of-the-art research facility.

Some 600 veterinary students from Tufts have spent time working with the foundation, according to Bowley.

“It’s a very unique opportunity for all of us to get into [reproductive] medicine,” said David Matsas, one of four professors from Tufts who are involved in the program.

Here’s an example of how it works:

A breed of dairy cattle known as Canadienne were the most common milking cows in Canada until the 19{+t}{+h} century, when they fell out of favor. Now they are critically endangered.

The foundation acquired a small herd from a farmer in upstate New York in 2010, harvested their germplasm, or genetic material, and sold the cows last year, banking some 300 frozen embryos and 3,000 samples of semen.

Such a schedule is typical, Bowley said. The foundation identifies a critically endangered species, acquires the animals, harvests their embryos and semen over a couple of years and then generally sells the animals to small farms with an interest in preserving heritage breeds.

On Saturday, visitors can view a number of endangered breeds — they’ll be in small pens on the open green — and look into the lab where frozen germplasm is stored. There will be sheep shearing and live cryogenics demonstrations.

Guests can also peruse displays that make the foundation’s argument for maintaining diversity in domestic breeds. (It may seem unremarkable that 95 percent of the milk we drink comes from Holstein cattle, for example, until one imagines what might happen if disease decimated that population).

And finally, visitors can dine on some of Swiss Village Farm’s heritage breeds. Julian’s Omnibus will be serving burgers, tacos and BLTs made from the farm’s livestock — which Bowley said is a good thing.

“It sounds counterintuitive, but to save them we must eat them,” she said. “They are working domestic livestock and if they have no job, there is no reason to preserve them.”

Parking will be available at Fort Adams State Park and free trolley transportation will be provided to Swiss Village Farm from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. There will be no parking available at SVF. For more information, call (401) 848-7229, e-mail info@svffoundation.org or visit svffoundation.org.